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Started Early, Took My Dog, by Kate Atkinson

Published in 2010, this is the fourth of Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie crime stories – though it’s much more than a crime story, and doesn’t really belong to Jackson, any more than the previous three have done.

This time Jackson shares the story with Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police superintendent, and Tilly Squires, an ageing actress; there is a constellation of other characters surrounding each of them. The action begins in 1975 when Tracy, as a uniformed PC, attends a murder scene, and the story occasionally reverts back to this time, as what happened then has a direct bearing on present events. Retiring after thirty years’ service, Tracy has taken a job as head of security in a shopping centre. One day she sees a child being mistreated there, and she takes a step which changes her life forever. Tilly, who is playing the part of the mother of a detective in a TV crime show, is in the early stages of dementia. And Jackson is trying to find the ‘origins’ of a woman who was adopted as a young child and taken to live in New Zealand. He is also making desultory efforts to find the ‘wife’ who stole most of his money in the previous book, looking for somewhere to settle down, and coming to terms with having a young son, a fact which Julia, the child’s mother, now acknowledges.

Each of these stories builds with its own separate momentum, each putting out shoots that become entangled with the other stories; Atkinson, with her trademark complexity of plotting, weaves almost all of them all together. There is a reasonably high degree of coincidence involved, and though the story carried me along, looking back I thought there was perhaps a bit too much of it. But I think I mind it less here than in straight crime stories because there is so much else going on.

This is in part the creation of lively and interesting characters. A lot of what we learn about them comes from the interior monologues in their heads. Thus Tracy: ‘These days more kids were being slipped tranquillizers and sleeping pills than people realized. If it had been up to Tracy she would have sterilized a lot of parents. You couldn’t say that, of course, made you sound like a Nazi. Didn’t take away from the truth of it, though.’ This is in fact telling not showing, but Atkinson seems to get away with it quite easily, perhaps because of the quiet humour that underlies it. Poor Tilley’s dementia is brilliantly evoked, though here there is real pathos, and not much humour. And Jackson just ploughs on, often with no real idea of where things are going: ‘It was like being in a game, a game where you didn’t know the rules or the identity of the other players and where you were unsure of the goal. Was he a pawn or a player? Was he becoming paranoid? (Becoming? he heard Julia say.)’ I’m always sorry when I get to the end of one of Atkinson’s books, because I want to know what happens next to the characters, and this is surely a good (if not very literary) test of characterisation.

Another strength of the book is the degree to which it can be seen as a ‘state of society’ novel, with greater depth than most crime stories. I’ve seen it called ‘literary crime’, and this isn’t just because it’s well written (thought it is). The focus is again on children lost and found, and crime is at the heart of this. But it is really the whole way people interact in modern society that is in question. How should people react when bad things that are not technically crimes happen to children? Or to animals? What level of trust is possible? How important are love and hope?

In this story Jackson admits that ‘Poetry had started to get under his skin’, and he surprises Julia by quoting Emily Dickinson. It is from her that the odd and attractive title of the book comes. The poem, which is about the incoming tide, doesn’t seem to have much to do with the story, but the line seems some how to sum Jackson up. He would start early, and he does take his dog.

Atkinson says there won’t be another Jackson Brodie book, at least for some time, which I’m really sorry about. You can read what she says here.

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